Republicans have ruled Wisconsin for a decade – but a court decision could change that

Lynn Carey, a retired nurse with a double lung transplant, has spent years trying to get Wisconsin lawmakers to improve healthcare. Carey organized voters in support of the Affordable Care Act back in 2009. Since its passage, she has pushed to get her Republican representatives in the state legislature to expand Medicaid coverage to its poorest residents.

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The idea has been overwhelmingly popular in Wisconsin: a 2019 poll showed 70% of voters in the state supported it. But Medicaid expansion hasn’t gone anywhere – even after Democrats won back Wisconsin’s governorship in 2018.

Republicans still hold near-supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature, and have shown no sign of compromise on this issue or many others popular with most Wisconsinites. Their legislative majorities are virtually impenetrable, cemented by Republican-drawn district lines that have guaranteed Republicans control of the legislature even in years where Democrats received more votes statewide. “We don’t have competitive districts where people have to listen to their constituents,” Carey said.

That could change soon.

In early October the Wisconsin supreme court agreed to bypass lower courts and hear a case seeking to strike down the legislative maps. The maps are so tilted in favor of Republicans, the plaintiffs in the case argue, that they violate the Wisconsin constitution’s guarantee of free speech and association. Liberals won a 4-3 majority on the court in April, and are widely expected to rule that the maps are unconstitutional. Oral arguments in the case are set for 21 November.

If the current maps are overturned in favor of new, more competitive ones, it’s likely to shrink the Republican advantage in the legislature from a supermajority to a narrow one – and give Democrats a fighting chance at winning control. That could transform politics in Wisconsin, forcing Republicans to consider supporting issues that have broad bipartisan support like Medicaid expansion and marijuana legalization that have been stymied by the legislature for more than a decade.

“The party majorities are sufficiently large that the legislature can get away with being completely unresponsive to anything a majority of voters want,” said Ken Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. “If you can’t lose, you don’t have to care. If you run the risk of losing, based on not caring, you will start to care.”

‘The last gasps of a gerrymandered legislature’

With their power threatened, Republicans are scrambling to preserve it. Janet Protasiewicz, a Milwaukee judge, won a seat on the state supreme court in April by 11 points, a landslide in Wisconsin politics. GOP lawmakers have since threatened to impeach her unless she agreed to recuse herself from weighing in on the case, arguing that she had prejudged the case because she called the maps “rigged” during her campaign. She declined to do so earlier this month. Wisconsin law allows for impeachment of an official for “corrupt conduct in office” or “commission of a crime or misdemeanor”. Protasiewicz is not accused of either. When Robin Vos, the powerful Republican speaker of the state assembly, asked three former conservative state supreme court justices for their advice on the issue, at least two told him they didn’t think it was warranted.

When their opinions became public, Vos said the state legislature would no longer consider Protasiewicz’s remarks out of office in a possible impeachment inquiry but maintained that impeachment was “on the table” depending on how the case went.

The impeachment threats underscore the anti-democratic power the GOP wields – and how desperate they are to hang on to it. Republicans hold a near-supermajority in Wisconsin’s state legislature – 22 of 33 seats in the state senate and 64 of 99 seats in the state assembly – even though Wisconsin is one of the country’s most competitive swing states.

More than a decade ago, shortly after winning unified control of the state, they drew districts to lock in their majorities. The lines have worked ruthlessly; in every two-year election over the last decade, they have consistently held nearly two-thirds of the seats in the state assembly, including in 2018 when Republicans lost the statewide vote. When Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the state in 2020 and Evers won re-election in 2022, Republicans were unscathed in the legislature, holding on to more than 60 seats.

In a dramatic power grab, Republicans in the state legislature used their majorities to curb the power of the newly elected Democratic governor and attorney general in 2018. And when Tony Evers, Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, called special sessions to address issues such as abortion, childcare and education, Republicans responded by showing up at the legislature then immediately ending their sessions rather than holding debate.

In April 2020, as Covid-19 swept the country, other states under both Democratic and Republican leadership moved their primaries rather than force voters to gather in crowded public spaces to cast their ballots. But Wisconsin Republicans refused to move the state’s primary, starting and abruptly ending a special legislative session called by Evers. They fought measures to expand remote voting during the pandemic. And after Trump lost the 2020 election in Wisconsin by just over 20,000 votes, Republicans launched a review of the election that leaned heavily into false conspiracy theories but failed to unearth any evidence of widespread fraud.

This year, they have moved to fire the non-partisan head of the state elections commission, one of the most widely respected election administrators in the country, even though Republicans unanimously voted to confirm her appointment just a few years ago. They have also refused to seat a Democratic appointee to the panel.

For over a decade, the gerrymandered maps have set up an unsettling reality: election results for state legislative races are largely determined before a single Wisconsin voter casts a vote. Now that there are enough liberal votes on the court to strike down the legislature’s maps, Republican lawmakers are leaning on the undemocratic power they have accrued to try and keep their strong majorities.

“It’s the last gasps of a gerrymandered legislature,” said Eric Genrich, a Democrat who serves as the mayor of Green Bay, one of several areas in the state Republicans have split into multiple districts to dilute the influence of their Democratic voters.

“You have a number of folks that are doing anything and everything to hold on to the power that they’ve accumulated over the last more than decade,” Genrich continued. “You just see more and more extreme ideas and policies being put forward in order to ensure that there isn’t fundamental democratic accountability built into our system.”

‘Cracking’ and ‘packing’

Republicans have held their advantage in the legislature by manipulating legislative lines across the state. In cities such as Madison, Green Bay and parts of Milwaukee, they have packed Democratic voters into a few districts, limiting their influence. They have attached Democratic voters in the suburbs elsewhere to deep-red rural districts.

Election observers call that practice “cracking”, and its inverse – squeezing voters of one party into a few districts – “packing”. Essentially, Republicans have configured the map to maximize their seats while limiting competition.

In 2020, Joe Biden defeated Trump in the state by more than 20,000 votes, but he won just 35 of the 99 districts. In 2022, Evers won re-election as governor with a three-point margin of victory, but carried just 38 of 99 assembly districts. Republicans’ lines are so effective that they won about 13 more seats in the state assembly in 2022 than they would if the map distributed the votes of both parties equally, according to an analysis by Planscore, a non-partisan site that evaluates maps.

Republicans dispute that the maps are to blame for Democratic disadvantages in the legislature. Most of the state’s Democratic voters are concentrated in just two areas, Madison and Milwaukee, while Republicans are spread across the entire state. In 2022, Evers got about 36% of his statewide vote from the two counties that house those cities.

“This idea that the maps are rigged and we have Democrat voters being unconstitutionally disenfranchised I think is a stretch,” said Brett Healy, the president of the MacIver Institute, a conservative thinktank.

Healy is skeptical that new maps would fundamentally change Republicans’ behavior.

“I don’t think much would change legislatively. It would be tough for Republicans, it would be tough for Democrats to compromise on their core beliefs,” he said. “When you have a slim majority, more often than not, your team comes together and votes as one.”

Mayer, the University of Wisconsin political scientist, disagrees.

“The state is gerrymandered within an inch of its life,” he said. “There’s no doubt that basically the Republican supermajorities in a 50-50 state are almost entirely the result of gerrymandering.”

Heavily Democratic Milwaukee and its Republican-friendly suburbs have been one of the key places where Republicans have manipulated lines to keep their advantage. In 2012, they attached Democratic areas on the outskirts of the city to Republican suburbs. But when those suburbs shifted towards Democrats during the Trump era, those districts became more competitive – so they redrew the lines in 2021 to remove Democratic voters to make the seats more safely Republican.

When Republicans drew new legislative maps in 2011, for example, they anchored the 24th assembly district in the northern suburbs of Milwaukee. Voters there reliably elected a Republican, Dan Knodl, to represent them in the assembly. But after 2020, when Joe Biden carried the district with 51% of the vote, a Republican victory seemed in jeopardy. Knodl had only won his 2020 re-election by percentage points, a drop of four points from his margin in 2018.

In 2021 Republicans redrew the map to protect Knodl, removing Democrats from the district and packing them into already Democratic-leaning districts nearby. And they extended the 24th district north, snaking along the coast of Lake Michigan, into areas that were more reliably Republican. Knodl won re-election in his new district in 2022 by more than 22 percentage points.

Bob Tatterson, a Democrat, lost to Knodl in 2022. He believes that the district would have been competitive if not for Republican redistricting.

“It was immediately obvious that what had happened was there were two competitive districts that had been essentially turned into two very uncompetitive districts,” he said.

Having districts that are significantly rigged in one party’s favor makes it more difficult to even recruit candidates to run, said Christy Welch, the chair of the Green Bay-area Brown County Democratic party.

“If you’re the state party, if you’re an individual donor, it makes sense that you want to spend your money in winnable races. And then that creates a vicious cycle of ‘it’s harder to get someone to run’. And then it’s hard to get someone to contribute to the campaign,” she said.

‘Glimmer of hope’

Republicans’ severe gerrymander has affected concrete policy issues in Wisconsin.

Polling conducted by Marquette University shows about 60% of Wisconsinites believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases (the new liberal majority on the state supreme court is also expected to strike down the state’s 1849 abortion ban). In a 2019 Marquette poll, 55% of respondents supported raising the minimum wage, nearly 60% said marijuana should be made legal and more than 70% of respondents said Wisconsin should adopt a non-partisan redistricting commission to draw its legislative maps rather than leaving that power with the statehouse.

None of these policies have been enacted.

The Democratic state senator Mark Spreitzer, who introduced a non-partisan redistricting bill in 2015 when he served in the state assembly that Republicans ignored, predicted more competitive legislative maps would force lawmakers to compromise on issues they are currently refusing to consider.

Republicans in the state legislature have rejected Evers’ calls for a special session to extend a pandemic-era childcare subsidy program using state funds, prompting Evers to redirect federal funds to keep the program in place – a temporary fix to a problem Spreitzer suggested could be resolved through bipartisan negotiation.

“There is bipartisan agreement that there’s a childcare crisis,” said Spreitzer. “That’s an area where if we had a legislature that was elected on fair maps, I think we could find a bipartisan solution.”

Spreitzer also pointed to the legalization of marijuana and Medicaid expansion as possible areas of bipartisan interest. Wisconsin is one of only nine states where lawmakers have refused to expand Medicaid.

“There are a lot of Republicans who are taking their marching orders from Robin Vos,” he said. “If they suddenly had to think for themselves, [they] would realize that it just makes sense to go ahead and get this done.”

Chris Ford, an emergency care physician in Milwaukee and chairman of the People’s Maps Commission, a non-partisan advisory redistricting board created by Evers in 2020, said expanding access to Medicaid was one of his main concerns. Citing the link between political representation and health outcomes, Ford said he initially got involved with fair maps activism to help his patients.

Medicaid expansion “can loosen up funds to relieve some of the lead exposure in Milwaukee county and rural counties as well. It could go to the expansion of rural mental healthcare. For me, as an emergency health provider, I could see it giving access to much needed primary healthcare for people before they end up in the ER,” Ford said.

Under the current maps, those issues have gone nowhere.

But with the new liberal majority on the state supreme court, some, like Democrat Mary Lynne Donohue, say there are finally signs of change.

Donohue, the president of the Sheboygan Area school district, ran for a seat in the assembly in 2020 even though she knew she had no chance to win. The Democratic-leaning city was once represented by a single Democratic-leaning district, but Republicans cracked it in two a decade ago to keep Democrats from electing one of their own to the assembly.

Donohue said the lack of electoral competition had demoralized residents, made it hard to recruit candidates for office, and stifled overall civic participation: “It’s hard to get a lot of energy going and to fully participate in the political process, because you know you can’t win.”

With the possibility of new maps looming, she thinks “people just have this glimmer of hope”.